Free Resume Training – Section V

What’s in This Section

Contact Info

Keywords

Accomplishments

Experience

Education

Affiliations

Trainings

One of the most critical aspects of your resume is going to be basically how it looks, how it reads, and the layout of that resume. So what I want to go over in this last section is the way that we want to structure the resume and what kind of elements we want to include in it.

Here are the basic sections that need to be addressed in your resume and in this order: contact info, keywords, and we’re going to be going through each one of these, this is just kind of an overview.

Accomplishments, experience, education, affiliation, and with education, experience and affiliations and training, which is the last one we’re talking about, mostly related to professional experiences, and affiliations in training.

Contact Information

This first and foremost should be at the tip top. This can include and should include name, phone number, professional email, and I do mean professional, OK? You don’t want an email address like [email protected] That’s not what we’re looking for here. You can use the free email clients like Gmail and Yahoo and all that kind of stuff. That’s fine, but everything before the @ needs to be one hundred percent professional.

You can put a mailing address there. Honestly, it’s not a requirement because most people are going to probably want to call you or email as opposed to actually mailing you something. But if you feel more comfortable with that, you can put that there.

Do not use your current employer’s contact information, that’s really just lame, don’t do it. No email address, no phone number, nothing from your current employer in the contact details. These people, a lot of them, especially the HR department, they’re going to be looking for any reason to not like you and trash your resume. That right there will be one for him.

Double-check all these details because they’re not going to go hunting for you. If your phone number’s not right or if you swapped out some letters in your email address, they’re just looking for a reason not to talk to you.

So they’re not going to go looking for the correct answer, right? Make sure to double-check that all the details are correct, your entire image presented on the resume and all of the contact information here needs to be one percent professional.

That means the voicemail when they call your phone and if they get transferred to a voicemail, they don’t need to be greeted with, hey yo, what’s up buddy? They need a professional message to answer the phone, OK? So if that’s what your voicemail says, then change it during this process while you’re submitting resumes.

Keywords

Keywords, use very strong keywords. I would say for example, if you have a huge paragraph, we don’t like those huge paragraphs, right? If you have a huge paragraph that has a lot of keywords in it and a whole bunch of other stuff, the keywords kind of get lost.

What you want to do is look through there, filter it out and get just the strong keywords. You can actually have a section there that is just keywords. Maybe bulleted or maybe a group of keywords with some kind of special characters separating the different keywords.

You need something that’s going to make an impact, and the keywords are going to come right after your contact information.

Text Blocks

Not a block of text longer than four lines, you don’t have that anywhere. If it’s longer than four lines, chances are none of it will get read, the reason’s very simple. As we’re reading through things and especially if we are scanning to find out if we’re going to be interested.

Here’s what happens, as soon as our eyes meet a huge block of text, the brain says that’s too complicated. I’m not feeling very motivated right now, so skip that and go on to something simpler. It’s just a fact that it happens in less than half a second, you’re eye meets that big block of text and you just skip.

How many times have you read a magazine article or seen an article online and unless you’re really, really, really needing that information, if you bump into a huge paragraph, you just skip over it and go to the next one.

How many times have you done that? I’m sure you have. We all have, and these people looking at your resume, they’re looking for an excuse to throw it away, not for something to keep them reading it. So don’t give them any excuses, like too much information in one spot.

Break up your paragraphs with keywords only, so you’ve got just the information that is critical and you can separate it with an asterisk.

Accomplishments

Every accomplishment should tell a short story. Every accomplishment should begin with an action and actually have some samples for you. Just a couple of examples, that are relating this in just a minute, like when you start the paragraph relating the accomplishment, begin it with an action, with a verb.

Show the benefit that the company received. When you show the action, show what the result was and what that company got out of it. Don’t just assume that they know and then show that benefit in numbers if at all possible. Sometimes we have things that we can’t relate a number directly, but if we can, it’s definitely a plus to do so.

Detail how that accomplishment could benefit the new company, the one that you’re applying to. If you can tie those in together, that’s great. If you’ve done your research and you found out there’s something similar that they’re facing, absolutely fantastic show, hey, this is what I did for them, I can do it for you too.

Accomplishments should start in the top half of page one, because remember where people are going to start reading? They’re going to start in that first third and they’re going to start reading down from there to make that 10 second decision whether or not they’re going to read more.

That’s where you want your accomplishments to show up right? Right there in that area where their eyes are going to fall because accomplishments pack a punch. If you word them right they cut to the chase and say, look, these are the things I can do, I can do it for you.

Consider putting some accomplishments in the experience section, which will be actually the next section. What you want to do is a lot of times, put your experience, list it like a regular experience. Then do a paragraph after that where you have taken your accomplishments and just abbreviate them.

I’ll show you an example here that will make it a little bit easier. Here is a sample of an accomplishment achieved that starts with a verb.

Achieved 120 percent sales growth six months in a row for total increased revenue of $133,500. So I have quantified things, I’ve put numbers on it. This is exactly what I was able to do, and, here’s the money that I brought in.

If you can show people I did something that brought in this extra amount of money, that right there tells them he’s worth a lot or she is worth a lot and possibly they can do the same thing here for us.

Here’s another example.

Developed processes to save an average of $12,100 per quarter without a negative impact.

Experience

Experience is our next section. This is a history of your professional work experience in reverse chronological order.

Each entry in the experience section should include a title, company name and the years that you worked there. Now what’s good to do is to make each one of those different elements stand out by typing them a little bit differently.

So for example, I put the company name in all caps, and then the location and years in just regular text. And then the title of the position I put in bold type, so that each one of those elements are distinct and somewhat different and they stand out and it’s easy for them to read it that way.

All this section needs to have is just the basic elements that we talked about here, the company, title and the years that you worked there.

Education

This is for the most part going to be a very simple area for you to do, but there is one thing that I want you to pay particular attention to.

Don’t put things here that you don’t actually have, a lot of people do that and that is not only lying, but it’s also asking for big trouble. Don’t put things that you don’t have. Don’t put degrees there that you don’t actually have. You can omit things, you can leave things out if you think that they would be harmful.

For example, let’s say that you have a now retired from being a college professor. Or you have retired from being an electronics engineer and you’re making a pretty good pension, but you’d like to just do a little bit of work and you want to get a job at a bookstore and you just decided that’s what you want to do for the rest of your life.

It might be a good idea for you to leave any of those degrees off of your name and even out of the education section and possibly out of the experience section. Just because for some jobs, and I’m going to say, and this is almost always the case, there could be exceptions, but for some jobs you seem overqualified and it could be a detriment to you.

They might not ever call you simply because they think wow, overqualified and going to want too much money. So for some things, and you’ll have to feel that out yourself, I can’t give you a hard and fast rule of where that falls into play, but that’s the kind of thing that you’re looking for. If you’re overqualified and there could be a concern there on their part, then you might want to leave some of that stuff out.

Schools, locations, degrees, dates of graduation. These are the kinds of things that we want to include in there. If you had a high GPA, then you want to put that in there too. If it was just average, then don’t list it. But you know, if it was like a 3.7 or a 3.8 or something like that, then definitely you want to get that in there.

Include any time in college, even if you didn’t graduate. So if you went to college for a couple of years, never got your degree, started working, just got too busy, maybe you started a family or whatever. Put the time in there that you did attend a college because that is of benefit.

Affiliations

Nothing personal, only professional affiliations. So you don’t put, for example, I’m a member, lifetime member of the NRA, unless your job happens to be related to hunting, right? For the most part, it can only do damage to you. There’s a lot of personal stuff that people can get involved in that can cause friction with other people and you don’t need that related to the position.

Any affiliations that are not only professional, but specifically related to that position, you want to make sure that you get those in there. So as an example, maybe you’re a photographer for a magazine or something and you’re applying somewhere else. If you are a member of some kind of association of photographers, then definitely you want to get that in there.

Training

This again, keep it professional, mostly training that has to do with your career or the field that you’re in. It shows that you’re an active learner and that’s a really good plus, especially if you’re kind of older, right? It shows that you can be tech savvy and not afraid to get into that kind of stuff.

So show that you do go to training courses and that you successfully completed them. Make sure that it’s only professional training, not stuff that you went through as a hobby. There’s no point in putting on there that you’re a black belt in karate, if you’re applying for a CEO position at some corporation.

Training though is actually a pretty important thing. If there is anything that you can put on there that supports that you’re willing to learn and that you’re willing to apply yourself.

Conclusion

I know a lot of these things that we’ve talked about are quite a bit different from the traditional way that they teach you in high school, what they teach you in college and vocational schools. But listen, it’s a different world out there, it’s a different work area.

If you want to stand a chance at positioning yourself where you can get more interviews, so that you can get yourself in front of people and say, hey, I can do the job let me demonstrate it to you.

Quit using those archaic and ancient methods that are going to get you no results except for getting your resume put in that nice little pretty filing cabinet that’s right under their desk.